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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components
Yakabod Offers Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Best Practices
The culture assessment looks at such issues as the structure of the organization, the nature of the hierarchy, the empowerment of employees, the presence of a mentoring system, physical and virtual work environment, and the promotion and reward system.
One of the issues they address is the collaboration dynamics in the organization. Are there opportunities for unstructured exchanges during business processes or is everything planned and structured? What is the speed of collaboration? How fast can people connect and what are the obstacles? Are there tools in place to support this collaboration? What are the information silos in the organization?
Another issue is the power of inertia. How fast can the organization change? Are they always re-organizing so employees feel that can ignore change? Are there frequent changes in leadership so employees feel they can wait out efforts? Are the employees savvy in social technology?
They also look at the implementation profile for the particular effort. Is the organization ready for this initiative? Is there executive support? Is there a sense of urgency? What are the consequences of not doing anything? What is the leadership strength of the sponsor? What is the financial commitment? How good is the fit of the solution with the need? Do the targeted business processes allow for knowledge sharing? How relevant is the process to the mission of the organization? Do the targeted processes go across the organization (the broader the better)?
Another key area is what they call “winning the middle.” They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful. This is especially important with enterprise 2.0 efforts as they often allow information to more easily go directly from workers to senior management, bypassing the filter of middle management. They look at the role of middle management in deciding on the effort, as well as their support. How does success of the effort fit into middle managers’ accountability areas? How does it affect their adva
Portals and KM: Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet
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Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people. Facebook, which is both free and a great example of web 2.0, seemed to be the right answer. They established a private Facebook group for Serena employees and they built a few simple custom Facebook apps to better enable intranet functions. Now they provide links through Facebook to documents stored securely behind the firewall. Access is just as secure as any other method. Serena employees go to specific people to get relevant information. For example, René and his staff provide press clippings and the HR people provide links to benefits information. In each case you learn about the people providing the information through their Facebook profiles, and not simply the content, itself.
Serena also has public Facebook groups to connect with customers and the broader marketplace. René said that some of his customer conversations have now moved away from email. Clients such as Stewart Cohen at Arbitron and Rajiv Amar at Intuit connect with René and his colleagues through Facebook. René is also one of my Facebook friends and I have noticed that he is usually at the top of the recently updated profile list so I can easily see what he is currently doing.
Serena has found that Facebook has also helped them with recruiting. People send their resumes through Facebook and prospective employees relate their use of the same networking tool that they use in their personal lives. Employee morale has also increased, as well as employee retention, as the whole firm is better connected. A few years ago, many people thought that blogs and business did not go together. We have seen that perception change dramatically. I wonder if the same will be soon said for Facebook and other social networking tools. Thanks to Serena for proving us with an example.
An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department
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When Al Essa was the CIO at
MIT’s Sloan School of Management,
he faced many of the challenges of any IT, or other department, lead.
There were multiple projects that needed to be monitored and teams to
be coached. Al wanted to become more of a coach than a monitor so he
had each team create a blog forum for every project. Managers now
provided updates and everyone in the department could access all
project blogs inside the firewall.The project blogs acted as true dashboards. Al could review each
project’s status on line and drill down for more detail as needed. He
could also point project teams to others who faced the same issues.
These status reports were now available to everyone in his department,
so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the
new blog reporting platform. The instant, secure, and constant
accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge
productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary
through multiple emails.Al was not done with what has become Enterprise 2.0. Every year, his
department is required to develop a business plan for the coming year.
In the past Al wrote these plans himself, a time consuming task. Then
he spent even more time getting input and buy-in from his staff for the
coming year’s efforts. Drafts were circulated and responded to
primarily through email.Al turned to blogs and wikis to involve his entire staff,
dramatically reducing the development time, and improving the quality
of the plan. In contrast to blogs, wikis are optimized for the
collaborative creation of content. Blogs support the personal voice of
the author. Wikis support a group voice through their open editing
capabilities.First, Al set up a blog to describe the business plan requirements
to his department members. The blog included the tactical concerns,
such as content requirements, deadlines, processes, and budget
guidelines. It also laid out the strategic issues, the narrative that
needed to convey the vision for the coming year. Al selected a blog so
he could control this educational content and ensure his staff received
the correct instructions. His staff could post comments and ask
questions until they completely understand the task requirements.
Everyone could see the questions and his answers, saving time and
creating a common understanding.Once everyone was clear on the task, the collaboration could begin
- absolutesubzero on 2007-12-13
on a solid foundation. Al then switched to a wiki, with its universal
editing privileges, to actually create the business plan so each of his
staff could participate. In the end, he submitted a business plan that
the entire department had a chance to shape. This both improved quality
and eliminated the old step of socializing the plan through emails and
attachments and numerous isolated personal discussions. His staff
bought into the plan as part of the process of jointly shaping the
content and was better prepared and motivated to execute it in the
coming year.
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